Sermon
Thy Will Be Done
May 15-16, 1999
Pastor Donald Sheley

Take your Bibles, please, and join with me in the passage that we have been discussing now for some weeks. We're going through the Sermon on the Mount, and we've come to that very familiar prayer that all of us have prayed since we were children. It's Matthew chapter 6:9. And Jesus discusses the subject of prayer. Verse 9 says, "In this manner, therefore, pray: Our Father in heaven, Hallowed be Your name. Your kingdom come, Your will be done On earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our debts, As we forgive our debtors. And do not lead us into temptation, But deliver us from the evil one. For Yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen. The man who knows God best is the man who prays best. Thus, I contend that it is imperative if we're going to be people of prayer, we must be diligent in our search to know God, because we should know the God to whom we pray.

There is a book that I reference frequently, and I do it again today, if you have a library in your home, Christian library, it's not complete unless you have this book. It's the classic of the decade, and probably will be the classic of the century. It's J. I. Packer's book 'Knowing God'. You should get it. Here's what the great theologian says, what were we made for? His answer, to know God. What aim should we set ourselves in life? The answer, to know God. What is the eternal life that Jesus gives? The answer, the knowledge of God, for in John 17:3 Jesus said, "And this is eternal life that they may know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent. What is the best thing in life, bringing more joy, delight, and contentment than anything else? The knowledge of God. 

Jeremiah 9:23-24 says, Thus says the Lord: "Let not the wise man glory in his wisdom, Let not the mighty man glory in his might, Nor let the rich man glory in his riches; But let him who glories glory in this, That he understands and knows Me. What, of all the states God ever sees a man in, gives God the greatest pleasure? The answer, I desire the knowledge of God more than burnt offerings, says God. Now in these few sentences we have said a very great deal. Our point is one to which every Christian heart will warm, though the person whose religion is merely formal will be not moved by it, and by this very fact his unregenerate state may be known. What we have said provides at once a foundation, a shape, and a goal for our lives plus a principle of priorities and a scale of values. 

Once you've become aware that the main business that you're here for is to know God, most of life's problems fall into place of their own accord. What makes life worthwhile is having a big enough objective. Something which catches our imagination and lays hold of our allegiance, and this the Christian has in a way that no other person has. For what higher, more exalted and more compelling goal can there be than to know God? In a previous page he writes, we have said that when people know God, losses and crosses cease to matter to them. What they have gained simply vanishes these things from their minds. And then the old professor says, I'm going to give you four great benefits for knowing God. 

Number one, those who know God have great energy for God. In the book of Daniel 11:32, the people who know their God shall be strong, and carry out great exploits. And the truth is this. That the more we know God, the stronger our faith, the more victorious our walk, but it's based upon the knowledge of the One to whom we pray and for whom we live. Secondly, he says those who know God have great thoughts about God. And he goes into the prayer chamber of Daniel and he says that it's always the best evidence of a man's views of God when you listen to him pray. Listen to Daniel. "Blessed be the name of God forever and ever. For wisdom and might are His. And He changes the times and the seasons; He removes kings and raises up kings; He gives wisdom to the wise And knowledge to those who have understanding. He reveals deep and secret things; He knows what is in the darkness, And light dwells with Him. O Lord the great and awesome God who keeps His covenant of love with all who love Him and obey His commands. Lord, You are righteous. The Lord our God is merciful and forgiving. The Lord our God is righteous is everything that He does. That's Daniel's prayer life. And when you really know God, you have great thoughts about God. 

Thirdly, when you know God, you show great boldness for God. And he takes Daniel who faces the lion's den, and Meshach, Shadrach, and Abed-Nego as they face the fiery furnace and he uses them as bold exploits of men who really knew their God. Those three fellows say to the king, king we know what you've said, but it really doesn't make any difference to us. We're not changing our mind. God can deliver us from that fiery furnace, and if He doesn't want to, it's all right anyway. We're not changing our minds. You see those three Hebrew children knew their God, and they didn't fear the opportunity to stand up for Him. And then lastly, those who know God, says Dr. Packer, have great contentment in God. There's no peace like the peace of those who's minds are possessed with full assurance that they have known God and God has known them, and that this relationship guarantees God's favor to them in life through death and on forever. You see, when you know God, there's no need to fear life nor death nor all of eternity because He's our heavenly Father. And wherever He is, we are going to be with him. But God is much more difficult to understand than most of us think. 

Old Isaiah says in Isaiah 55:8-9, "For My thoughts are not your thoughts, Nor are your ways My ways," says the Lord. "For as the heavens are higher than the earth, So are My ways higher than your ways, And My thoughts than your thoughts. And because God's ways are different than ours, and because His thoughts are so much higher than ours, Christian prayer is characterized throughout the Scripture as an experience of striving, of persistence striving, with God with intense, with desperate, agonizing in God's presence. Jeremiah says in 29:13, you will seek Me and find Me, when you search for Me with all your heart. It's total abandonment to find Him. 

And Jesus in Luke 11:5-13 tells the story, He says, And He said to them, "Which of you shall have a friend, and go to him at midnight and say to him, 'Friend, lend me three loaves; 'for a friend of mine has come to me on his journey, and I have nothing to set before him.' "and he will answer from within and say, 'Do not trouble me; the door is now shut, and my children are with me in bed; I cannot rise and give to you'? "I say to you, though he will not rise and give to him because he is his friend, yet because of his persistence he will rise and give him as many as he needs. "So I say to you, ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. "For everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened. Jesus paints the picture of persistence. Asking, seeking, and keep knocking until the answer comes. Persistent prayer. 

You go through all the Old Testament. You'll find it in the New Testament where people simply gave themselves to desperate agonizing prayer before God. David prayed and fasted all night for his son that he might be cured. Daniel besought the Lord on behalf of his own people for God's mercy. Ezra interceded for God's people with fasting and weeping, and almost every place you go in the Old Testament, as well as in the new, you find this dimension of persistence, and agony of soul, and the pursuance of God. Saint Monica was the mother of Augustine the great theologian, but in his earlier days Augustine was a wayward sinner. He was the shame of the community and of his family, and his mother Monica stayed at home and wept and prayed for her boy. She did that night after night, week after week, month after month, year after year; God, save my boy! God did and old Augustine became one of the greatest theologians of all time. The miracle happened because of persistent prayer. 

One theologian writes, lose the persistence in prayer, lose the real conflict of will and will, lose the habit of wrestling and the hope of prevailing with God, make it mere walking with God in friendly talk, and as precious as that might be, yet you tend to lose the reality of prayer at last if we miss that characteristic of prayer, persistence. Now I want to walk you down a path where most of us have never journeyed in prayer, but sometimes the prayer of faith involves defiance of God bordering on presumption. You say, what does that mean Pastor? Remember we said that God's ways are different than our ways, and His thoughts are different than ours, and this whole aspect of agonizing with God in prayer is bringing our ways and our thoughts in harmony with Him. And that's where the agony of prayer really is. Listen to Moses. He said, O Lord, why hast Thou done this evil to this people? Why didst Thou ever send me? For since I came to Pharaoh to speak in Thy name, he has done evil to this people and Thou hast not delivered Thy people at all. You say, Moses said that? Moses said, God, why did you do this evil thing to this people. He's accusing God of doing evil. You say, do you talk to God that way? Moses did, because what you have here is the picture of a human heart and mind wrestling with divine ways and thoughts, and somehow trying to understand it. 

Listen to David. David says, O God, don't just sit there silent and inactive when we pray. Answer us! Deliver us! David said, God, get up out of your chair and do something. You say, I would never talk to God that way, but David did and he was a man after God's own heart, and God knew that. And David took his friendship with God to the brink of breakage with presumption. Not because he didn't love God, but because he wrestled in trying to understand the ways of God. He writes again, rouse Thyself. Why sleepest Thou O Lord? Get out of Your bed dear God. Awake. Do not cast us off forever. Why doest Thou hide Thy face? Why doest Thou forget our affliction and oppression, for our soul is bowed down to the dust. Our body cleaves to the ground. Get up and come and help us. You see, what we have in the Scriptures is prayer at its intensity where the human mind wrestles with the mind of God. 

Picking up a diary of a great saint who lived some six hundred years ago, here's what she wrote. I do not wonder God that You have so few friends from the way You treat them. Now we laugh. We say, do you talk to God that way? No, what you have here is the anguish of a heart in prayer trying to understand the ways of God. You say, Pastor, have you ever talked to God that way? Yes I have. I think David in Psalm 73. Turn there with me. I think it's Psalm 73. It probably says it best for me. Listen to David. Listen to a man deeply struggling with this whole idea in prayer of trying to figure out God's ways. He says, Truly God is good to Israel, To such as are pure in heart. 

Now always usually in Jewish writing, the sums, the summation of the comment starts the passage. He says God I know one thing. This I'll never deviate in this. You are truly good to us. I know that You're good. I know that, but here's my struggle. But as for me, my feet had almost stumbled; My steps had nearly slipped. For I was envious of the boastful, When I saw the prosperity of the wicked. For there are no pangs in their death, but their strength is firm. They are not in trouble as other men, Nor are they plagued like other men. Therefore pride severs as their necklace; Violence covers them like a garment. Their eyes bulge with abundance; They have more than heart could wish. They scoff and speak wickedly concerning oppression; They speak loftily. They set their mouth against the heavens, And their tongue walks through the earth. They are defiant. They are proud, God. Those wicked people bother me. Therefore his people return here, And waters of a full cup are drained by them. And they say, "How does God know? And is there knowledge in the Most High?" behold, these are the ungodly, Who are always at ease; They increase in riches. 

He said, God, I don't figure it out. They talk against You. And he said all they do is cloak themselves with earthly riches and they don't seem to have any want. Now he turns the prayer, and here's where the wrestling begins. Look at verse 13; Surely I have cleansed my heart in vain, And washed my hands in innocence. For all day long I have been plagued, And chastened every morning. He said, God, I'm Your kid and I get beat up every morning by You. Why? Here's a man in prayer, deeply trying to understand the ways of God. He said, If I had said, "I will speak thus," Behold, I would have been untrue to the generation of Your children. When I thought how to understand this, It was too painful for me. He said God, I got to tell You, my heart hurts. I don't figure it out how You bless the wicked and I get chastised every day. Then watch how it turns again. Until I went into the sanctuary of God; Then I understood their end. God, it's when I walked into Your presence and I just let You be God, I began to understand. He said, Surely You set them in slippery places; You cast them down to destruction. Oh, how they are brought to desolation, as in a moment! They are utterly consumed with terrors. As a dream when one awakes, So, Lord, when You awake, You shall despise their image. 

He's saying they may last for today, but they'll be gone tomorrow. They're under God's judgment, and then he said, Thus my heart was grieved, And I was vexed in my mind. Why is he grieving? Well he tells us. I was so foolish and ignorant; I was like a beast before You. He saying, God, I said all these things and I'm sorry. I just acted like an animal in Your presence, and I'm sorry. Thus my heart was grieved, And I was vexed in my mind. I was so foolish and ignorant; I was like a beast before You. Nevertheless I am continually with You; You hold me by my right hand. You will guide me with Your counsel, And afterward receive me to glory. Whom have I in heaven but You? And there is none upon earth that I desire besides You. My flesh and my heart fail; But God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever. Yes, David said sometimes when I talk to You God I feel like a beast because I was unfair. But you see, the wonderful thing about friendship is that a friend will let you say what you want to say in their presence, and they never turn you away nor judge you for it.

And even sometimes in the deepest of anguish when we pour out our hearts to our friends, we may even hurt them in what we say, and yet a true friend loves us just as much or more when we've poured out our heart. And that's the way with God. And one thing I encourage you, you must be honest with God. That's part of knowing Him so He can reveal Himself to you. Because He already knows every thought that you have anyway. Now, this brings me to the sermon of the morning. We come to that prayer. We've learned what it means to be able to say, our Father. We know what it means to reverence the God of the heavens, the Creator God. We understand what it means to hallow His name, to lift His high name by our life and our actions, by those around us, hallowed be Thy name. Then we took a couple Sundays to understand Thy kingdom come. Now, we've walked into Gethsemane. This is the Gethsemane of the prayer, and might I suggest that you, if you don't pray this part of the prayer with honesty, cross it out in your Bible. Because this is the depth and this is the heart of honesty with God. Thy will be done. I mean, it's the hardest part of the prayer, and I want you to go with me to Jesus in the garden, and let me show you how He wrestled with this part of the prayer. 

We're in Matthew 26:36. Now I say this is the hardest part of the prayer, and if you can't say it honestly, don't say it. Here's what Jesus did. It says, Then Jesus came with them to a place called Gethsemane, and said to the disciples, "Sit here while I go and pray over there." And He took with Him Peter and the two sons of Zebedee, and He began to be sorrowful and deeply distressed. Then He said to them, "My soul is exceedingly sorrowful, even to death. Stay here and watch with Me." He went a little farther and fell on His face, and prayed, saying, "O My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from Me; nevertheless, not as I will, but as You will." Then He came to the disciples and found them sleeping, and said to Peter, "What? Could you not watch with Me one hour? "Watch and pray, lest you enter into temptation. The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak." Again, a second time, He went away and prayed, saying, "O My Father, if this cup cannot pass away from Me unless I drink it, Your will be done." And He came and found them asleep again, for their eyes were heavy. I want you to notice quickly two things about this prayer.

Notice the agony. He said My soul is exceedingly sorrowful. Now those English words do not do good to the Greek, for in the Greek it says, I anguish in wretchedness. It's an agony so deep and so painful, there are no words to describe it, and Jesus is praying this prayer not My will but Thy be done. But it was prayed in deep anguish, and if Jesus prayed this part of the prayer with anguish, we can't say it lightly. And there's another aspect. I'm hurrying along now. Notice the loneliness of Jesus. It's always amazed me that the Son of God would want three weak fishermen for moral support at a time at the cross, but they're all asleep. And I think one of the saddest pictures, at least one that moves my heart deeply, is that one where the artist painted Jesus kneeling at the rock all alone. All of His friends are asleep, and I make this observation, there are some prayers we pray and some decisions we wrestle with that are so deep no one else can become a part of that prayer. There is a loneliness that always goes with deep intense spiritual prayer because it's one man, one woman, wrestling with God. It's a scene most sacred, and it's a lonely scene. 

One commentator writes, while others sometimes fell on their faces before Jesus, this is the only time Jesus is said to have prostrated Himself. The posture indicates the strength of the emotion which leads to prayer, but the address, My Father, lifts the whole episode from that of an abject appeal to the intimate communion of the Son of God with His Father whose will He delights to do. Now the issue is not whether or not Jesus should accept the Father's purpose, but whether that purpose need include the horrifying cup of vicarious suffering, or whether there is some other way. What he's saying is, Jesus didn't wrestle with the idea of why He came. He knew that He was the Lamb slain before the foundation of the world. He knew that He had come to seek and to save sinners. That was His assignment, but what He's doing here on His knees, is God, I know what Your purpose is, but is there some other way we can deviate? Are there some limits to Your purpose? Can we stretch them? Jesus' prayer is an exploration of those limits, but never attempts to break outside them. Jesus wrestled with that prayer, Thy will be done. 

Now, write down two words. When we're praying this prayer there are two things that are deeply involved. First of all is submission, and secondly, surrender. Now there are sometimes submission, according to the dictionary is to bow before in humble contrite spirit to accept the authority of another. And sometimes that is easy for us in prayers to say God, I surrender my will to Your will and to Your authority. I bow before You. That sometimes is an easier prayer to pray than the prayer of surrender, because sometimes in our prayers you go that second step, and to surrender means to give up, to release, to abandon to the will of another. And when you come to that place you abandon all the dreams for yourself, all the hopes, all that you aspire to, you abandon them and say, God, Thy will not mine. Now that gets hard because sometimes God's will includes what we don't like. Sometimes it includes failure, because the only time that God can get our attention sometimes is to break our pride and let us fail. Sometimes it's through the avenue, through the journey, of pain and sickness and we call out to God and say ,we don't want this sickness! Heal us! And God answers back in His own way and says I have a purpose for this journey, and for us to say in the midst of our pain, Thy will be done, is hard.

And sometimes His will includes physical impairment. I think of the story of Joni who goes around in her wheelchair today. She tells the story after her accident she became a paraplegic. She kept saying, God, I don't want to be this way. She ran around to every divine healing service she could. She said, God, I don't want this!. I don't want to live the rest of my life without the use of my hands or my feet. And she tells the story that when she came to that moment where she could say, Thy will be done, that's the moment God began to use Joni Erickson to bless the world. You see, you come to your Gethsemanes when you start praying, Thy will be done, and Gethsemane always stands for death. The death of one's self. The death of one's ambition. To die for another. But ladies and gentlemen, it's when we can honestly with every part of our being, in our prayer after we've anguished over something, after we have wrestled this issue with God, to come to that point where we say, Thy will be done. That's when we come to genuine peace. That's peace.

Let's pray. Lord Jesus, we're really trying to understand this prayer that You taught us to pray, but we came to a hard one today. We're a people with our wills and our dreams and our desires, and usually much of our prayer is made up of telling You what they are. But we've observed that right in the heart of Your prayer, You brought in Gethsemane. And most of us don't like to visit there. Maybe today there are people who are wrestling with issues in their life that even to some degree have embittered them against You, dear God, because they blamed You. They refuse to accept, and their life it torn apart. There is no peace. Lord Jesus, help us all to be able to honestly say every time we pray this prayer, Your will O God is the supreme goal of our life. And everybody said, amen. God bless you.